For our money, that headline is already highly selective. To our eye, the Times' editing of the available video is even worse, though thoroughly typical, a point we'll discuss below.

In our view, that Times report is journalistically abysmal. That said, an appearance on last Saturday's Washington Journal quickly raised a different question:

Should we regard the shooting death of Stephon Clark as "a murder," as "an execution?" In one way, we got our answer last year when Hillary Clinton published What Happened, her account of the 2016 presidential campaign.

At one point in her book, Clinton describes the shooting death of Trayvon Martin as a "murder." She wrote this even though a duly constituted jury had ruled that it wasn't a murder.

Was that shooting a murder? In a detailed set of real-time on-line comments, Ta-Nehisi Coates had said the jury reached the appropriate verdict, although he began back-pedaling the very next day and had completely reversed himself, without intermediate explanation, before a month had passed.

By traditional standards, it would be astonishing to see a person of Clinton's position publish such a remark. But in our current tribal war of the all against the all, traditional standards of behavior are disappearing fast, even Over Here within our own liberal tents—and even on C-Span's Washington Journal.

The C-Span guest to whom we refer was Kirsten West Savali, associate editor for social justice and education at The Root. To watch her 34-minute appearance, you can just click here.

Savali appeared on Washington Journal to discuss the topic of "Race and Police Shootings." Within the first few minutes, she had described the shooting death of Clark as "an execution" and "a murder," and as a "crime against humanity."

Beyond that, she had said that the policing in question was "a continuum of slave patrols," a general assessment she voiced at three separate points during her appearance.

Along the way, she made several indecipherable claims about the number of unarmed black women being shot and killed by police, apparently citing this largely indecipherable study from Washington University in St. Louis.

In a remarkable performance of an approach which might be called No Complaint Left Behind, she complained about the use of video and body cams in the attempt to monitor such events. She complained that video "causes a lot of trauma for a lot of people to have to see people on the ground over and over again," then said this about body cams:

SAVALI (3/31/18): It's very, very difficult to say that this is something that will be beneficial for people in the long run because they [police] still have their excuses, they still have their justifications.

No complaint left behind! With respect to the death of Clark, she kept stating the fact that he was "in his own back yard," "on his family's property" when the shooting occurred.

Eventually, two callers alleged that Savali was being selective in her presentation of facts. When they did, Savali responded by repeating the same sets of facts, then saying "Those are the facts. Those are the facts," full stop, as if she possibly didn't understand the nature of the criticism.

Many people will agree with every word Savali said. To our eye, it's plain that she was fully sincere—and there is, of course, no ultimate way to judge the fairness or completeness of her assessments or of her presentations of facts.

In the end, these are always matters of judgment, and our fragile human judgment will often perhaps be bad.

Was the shooting death of Stephon Clark an execution "in occupied territory" by a continuation of slave patrols? In the end, there's no ultimate way to assess such representations, or to assess Hillary Clinton's remarkable statement that a "murder" occurred in the death of Trayvon Martin.

That said, Clinton's act represents a remarkable change in American norms. To our eye and ear, so did this blog post by Kevin Drum, who some of the analysts still describe as their favorite blogger.

The headline on that New York Times video report is, at least, factually accurate. Stephon Clark, age 22, was in fact shot and killed "in his backyard"—or at least, in his grandmother's back yard.

The headline on Drum's blog post was different. That headline implies a state of affairs which plainly isn't true:

"It’s Time to Stop Treating Every Fleeing Teenager Like a Crazed Killer"

Do American police officers "treat every fleeing teenager like a crazed killer?" To the extent that the implied claim can be paraphrased or parsed, it's clear that they do not.

The implied claim does express, in its vast frustration, the moral greatness we modern liberals bestow upon ourselves in much the way real humans breathe. But it set the tone for an anguished post which defined a new, post-morality liberal morality, a murder-crying morality which could perhaps be lighting the way toward a dusty cultural death.

The C-Span callers we cited above told Savali that she wasn't showing "enough consideration to police." In the end, that too is a matter of judgment.

For ourselves, we think that was a reasonable criticism of Savali's presentations, but we'd say it's just flat-out true concerning Drum's earlier post.

DRUM (3/23/18): As my post earlier this morning made clear, teenagers these days are less violent and better adjusted than they used to be, and this is a permanent change. A few decades ago, people were chronically apprehensive around teens in public places, afraid they might be assaulted or even killed if they so much as looked at them funny. And there was something to that. Back then, teenage brains had all been damaged by a lifetime of lead poisoning, often making them impulsive and violent. But that’s long in the past, and there’s no longer any excuse for this apprehension. Without lead poisoning to wreck their brains, they’re just ordinary teenagers, like teenagers of every past era.

This is something that I wish everyone could internalize. Teenagers just aren’t unusually dangerous these days. If you chase one into a backyard and you see a glint in his hand, you probably don’t need to unload 20 rounds into his body as if you were trying to bring down a PCP-crazed rhinoceros.

Did Drum think Clark was a teenager? It's not unlike the modern liberal to throw two policemen under the bus for their conduct in a case where the liberal is unclear on even the most basic facts. That said, you may have noticed the one key word we edited out of Drum's remark:

The police offers probably didn't need to fire those twenty shots, Drum said. In our view, that word is amazingly easy to type when you're sitting in comfort and safety many miles down the coast.

For better or worse, those Sacramento police officers weren't lounging in safety and comfort that night, the way the modern progressive typically is when he executes an unexplained flip on the Zimmerman verdict. Or when he throws two officers under the bus, as Drum does in this disdainful upper-class passage:

DRUM (continuing directly): At the risk of being misunderstood, I want to add that this is very much a racial thing. The lead epidemic hit blacks harder than whites, and this meant that the violence level of black teenagers rose more than it did for white teenagers. In the early 90s, even Jesse Jackson was famously scared of black teenagers. Cops internalized this, mixed it up in a stew with lots of old-school racism, and ended up killing a lot of black teenagers.

And they still do, even though the violence level of black teens also dropped more than it did for white teens once we removed lead from gasoline. In the year 2018, there’s just no excuse for cops or anyone else to routinely treat black teenagers as scary hoodlums who might kill them at the drop of a hat. They’re back to being ordinary people these days, just like teenagers of every other color.

...Arguments based on social justice might or might not mean much to most cops, but I’m offering them another one: teenagers of all races, and especially black teenagers, are fundamentally, permanently, a lot less violent than they used to be. It’s time to recognize that and adjust our policing strategies accordingly.

Teenagers are fundamentally a lot less violet than they used to be, Drum writes.

We think that's very importantly true. With respect to the good, decent, impressive kids on display in all our cities, we'd go well beyond that statement. It should be stated more often.

That said, when police officers are chasing a suspect in the dark of the night, they aren't chasing the average teenager, andt they aren't chasing the model teenager.

In the typical case, they don't know who they're chasing at all. From his easy chair far away and down the coast, Drum is willing to drop his R-bombs on these two Sacramento cops, who only knew that they were chasing a fleeing suspect who had apparently committed a series of property crimes.

It's easy for Drum to throw demographic statistics at them as they go around the corner of a house, in the dark of the night, and suddenly confront that fleeing suspect in the dark. It's easy for Drum to talk about the "stew" they maintain in their heads, "a stew with lots of old-school racism," while he sits in pundit splendor in a very safe place, tut-tutting about the way arguments based on social justice may not mean to most cops.

It's easy to do this, and it's transparently inhuman. Don't miss the key point in this:

It was OK when Jesse Jackson said that he was afraid of black teens who were just walking down the street. Yay yay yay yay yay yay yay! Jesse's on our team!

It isn't OK if working-class cops are apprehensive, frightened or scared when they're on the job, in the dark, chasing an unknown actual suspect. They are from the lesser breed. As everyone in the country knows, they aren't on our pseudo-liberal team. They've been Other for a long time.

This is ugly behavior. It's ugly behavior of a type which flows from the modern liberal in a way which leaves us rightly despised. Frankly, we're amazed that modern liberals aren't more despised on this general basis. Perhaps the reduction in lead exposure has reduced the impulse toward disgust.

Burrowing through his statistics about the ways of the modern average teen, Kevin Drum wasn't fearful as he composed his post. Rounding the corner of a building in the dark, chasing someone they didn't know, we're going to say that those two officers quite possibly and sensibly were.

We'll leave the question of what they should have done that night to people less fine than Drum. For ourselves, we'd like to see police officers chuck their guns and run away in a situation like that. We're going to guess that the two men on that slave patrol that night hadn't been trained to do that.

At this point, we're left with two considerations. First, let's consider the lonesome death of Bijan Ghaisar. After that, we'll return to that video report by the Times.

Who the heck in Bijan Ghaisar? He's someone you've never heard of and surely never will! At the age of 25, he was shot and killed by U.S. Park Police outside Washington last November.

Stating the obvious, you have never heard his name because he was only an unarmed Iranian-American, and that doesn't count.

In Monday's Washington Post, an editorial railed about the conduct of the police officers who shot and killed Ghaisar, and about the months of police silence which have followed. You'll see what follows nowhere else. Within our modern liberal moral disorder, people like this don't count:

WASHINGTON POST EDITORIAL (4/2/18): To put it mildly, the officers' conduct seemed at odds with good and standard police procedures, which strongly discourage pursuits unless the public would be at risk from a fleeing suspect. The Park Police's own long-standing policy allows officers to give chase only if a felony has occurred, which in this case seems doubtful, or if a suspect poses "a clear and immediate threat to public safety." There is no indication Ghaisar presented such a threat.

As for approaching his car with guns drawn, which the officers did twice, that also defies common sense and sound procedure. In the dash-cam video, recorded by a Fairfax County police cruiser that tailed the Park Police car, the officers are seen opening fire after Ghaisar's vehicle has stopped, and is starting to roll slowly away again—and presenting no visible threat to anyone. Incredibly, they fired nine bullets at Ghaisar, hitting him four times in the head.

Official silence is no longer acceptable. A man is dead. Why?

We've discussed similar incidents in the past. Within our modern liberal squalor, it doesn't count if whites or Hispanics are shot and killed in apparently ludicrous situations. To the list of the liberally disappeared, we can now add people like Ghaisar.

The Times selected one lone fact to place in that headline. Stephon Clark "was in his backyard," our greatest newspaper declared.

Essentially, that's accurate. Having said that, please note the way Sacramento's KCRA-TV, an NBC affiliate, presented that accurate fact in a similar video report:

"As the two officers run, guided by the chopper, Stephon Clark climbs on top of something and jumps over a fence and, unbeknownst to police, into his gramdother's yard."

KCRA included a second fact! Police officers didn't know that Clark was "in his own back yard." And yes, that actually matters.

Duh! On C-Span, Savali said, again and again, that Clark had been "in his own yard," "on his family's property," when he was executed by the slave patrol. By the time she was done, a listener might have thought that Clark had been cooking burgers on the grill when police officers arrived at his home, then shot and killed him.

In fact, Clark had been fleeing police, running through other back yards and hurtling over at least one fence on his way to his own back yard, which police didn't know was his. This brings us to the remarkable bit of editing the New York Times executed on the tape it includes in its videotape report.

On the original, widely aired helicopter videotape, Clark is clearly shown vaulting over a fence into his own back yard. You're still allowed to see that video in that KCRA report.

By now, though, the New York Times has apparently decided that you shouldn't see that. Along with many other orgs, they have edited—disappeared—that part of the videotape. When you see the Times videotape report, you aren't told that the police officers didn't know that Clark "was in his own back yard." Also, you aren't allowed to see the full tape of his flight that night.

Did those officers misbehave that night? We'l leave that question to people more experienced than we and less tribal than Drum.

But starting with the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, the liberal world has disappeared and invented facts about every one of these widely discussed police shooting incidents. We've done it again and again and again, always making the story better from our gruesome tribal perspective. In short, we're deeply dishonest and very lost and we're extremely bad people.

Some people loathe us for this conduct. It's hard to say they're wrong. Beyond that, it's hard to say that a modern continental nation can survive the onslaught of life forms like us.

One final point:

The death of Stephon Clark is important. Within the rules of modern liberal culture, Bijan Ghaisar's death is not.

Dr. King was shot and killed fifty years ago this week. In his entire life and ministry, Dr. King never said a single word which would excuse the kinds of tribalized people we've become.

Stephon Clark counts; so does Bijan Ghaisar. But so do those Sacramento police officers, despite the stew of condescension we happily dump on their heads.

76 comments:

Bob's going to get a lot of criticism from the usual suspects today for this post. He deserves some of it. Here are a few thoughts:

1. It's certainly true that the media's selective reporting makes it difficult for people to know the frequency of problematic shootings, and easy for runaway emotions to get the better of people.2. It's also true that police actively pursuing a fleeing suspect are in a much more dangerous place than Kevin Drum discussing the statistically accurate statement that young people are less violent than they were 30 years ago.3. However, it's also true that Jesse Jackson saying that he fears groups of young Black men isn't the same as 2 police officers killing an unarmed suspect. For one, Jesse Jackson's decision to cross the street didn't leave anyone dead.4. Another important difference is that part of the job of the police is to put themselves in dangerous situations. That's what they're trained to do, and why they are allowed to retire with pensions at a relatively early age.5. It's important to be accurate and careful in one's reporting, but if the standard is that we can't wait to give an opinion until we know every possible fact then that means that we're never going to be permitted to criticize a police shooting.6. From what I've read and seen, it sure looks to me like there are a lot of quick-trigger police shootings. Many of those end up in the death of an unarmed young Black man. It's possible that I'm seeing an unrepresentative subset of those incidents, but whether or not race plays a role it sure looks to me like police are abusing their authority in too many instances.7. My uninformed hunch is that police are being trained to treat every interaction with the public as a situation in which they might be killed. While that's certainly true, I think that mindset ignores the obligations of the police officer to protect the public and unnecessarily leads to too many quick-trigger shootings.

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I know this comment is repetitive, but inner city blacks are killing other blacks at a dreadful rate. Inner city black desperately need aggressive, effective police protection. A media narrative that discourages the police has resulted in the rate of black murder victims increasing by 2000 per year.

I assume then that you are in favor of increased attention to domestic violence? Most murders are committed by men against women. And I assume you support gang diversion programs in our schools. The remainder of murders are generally gang-related and such programs have proven successful. I assume you also approve of anti-poverty programs. Poverty is one of the strongest predictors of violence and black people tend to be poorer and thus in greater need of help and inclusion in the middle class. I assume that if you don't like the results of Republican policies, you are willing to abandon them and try what works.

Anon 1:20 -- almost all of these black murders by other blacks and by police have taken place in cities long governed by Democrats. I don't think this is a partisan problem, but if it is, it's Democratic policies that are at fault.

David, David, David. Municipalities aren’t little city-states untouched by Federal and State laws. And while many of our largest cities are governed by Democratic mayors and city councils, they are affected by laws passed in DC and state capitols. Why in my own little burg, the Mayor has no effective control over the police force. She can only fire the commissioner. The state is responsible for the governance of our police force. Not to let go unmentioned, are the many Law Enforcement Bills of Rights that have been passed by state legislatures. They give officers privileges that are not shared by the fellow citizens when they are accused of flouting the law.

In fact, blacks killed by whites has increased by a greater percentage than blacks killed by blacks.

David's assertions are absurd. Democratics support policies that help lessen crime, as already commented on. Republicans do not share that interest; their goals are self-serving at the expense of those without the means to defend against Republican wanton ways.

Anon 6:22 -- the article you link is abusing percentages to mislead readers. 93% of blacks are killed by other blacks. The increase in blacks killed by whites (which includes Hispanic murderers) is a tiny number of people, compared to the many thousands of blacks killed by other blacks.

All people are more likely to be killed by members of their own race. That's because people tend to self-segregate in work and home. It is unremarkable to point this out. It says nothing at all about police killing unarmed African Americans at a disproportionate rate, which is the topic at hand.

Do police really kill unarmed African Americans at a disproportionate rate? African Americans commit crimes at a higher rate. So, it's not clear whether African Americans are killed at a higher rate, relative to the amount of criminal behavior.

Here's a way to understand why it's wrong to simply look at a rate relative to population: Police kill people age 20 - 30 much more frequently than they kill people age 2 - 12 or age 60 - 70. That's not because police are prejudiced against people in their 20's. It's because people in their 20's more frequently behave in ways that can lead to police killings.

He was running away from police and had just climbed a fence into his grandmother’s yard. Police did not know whose yard it was. The news showed video of him running and being tracked via thermal camera from the air.

Appreciate the cordial response. I am aware of these details. Still, it was a horrific failure on the part of police to kill this unarmed man. People like David are just too ready to declare this young man a data point, shrug and move on (and then nastily and repetitively accuse others of not caring about black fatalities). He is fond of citing the “Ferguson Effect” seeming to blame community demands for better policing for looser policing and more crime. Actually, this would pretty clearly indicate a failure of police to properly do their job, tough as it may be. Too many people conclude that all police shootings are justified and too many that all are murder, especially when there is a black victim. It’s disappointing how few people look at these incidents individually and objectively.

Any cop that cites a "Ferguson Effect" should be fired immediately. The PTSD of the police officers, OTOH, should be addressed through better mental health programs for police officers.Of course, this will need to be paid for. I suggest we reverse the tax reform bill we recently enacted. It should be easy. all we have to do is explain, we (the people) bailed out the businesses when they crashed the world's economy through fraud, it's now the turn of those businesses to return the favor. What American businessman would have the temerity to question that?

Each of these incidents involves a unique set of facts and a context that makes assessing what happened challenging. These specific incidents become national current events because they have certain characteristics, such as an unarmed young man shot in his "home." Because only such ambiguous circumstances get widely reported -- the open and shut cases do not -- it appears as if these cases are happening all the time. That is what national reporting does, especially when humans are ill-equipped to assess the statistical frequency of shocking events. Police are trained to shoot when endangered because their job, while dangerous inherently, is supposed to be to minimize danger to themselves and others. They don't go out there to be targets. This idea that "they knew the job was dangerous when they took it" is inconsistent with their training and the belief that even police have the right to come home safely each night, despite being in a role where they must protect public safety. So they will shoot faster than the average citizen thinks they should. And they do shoot to kill.

The larger problem here is Somerby's dislike of generalizations made by activists. He objects to their language, which is intended to encourage action, not report facts. Even Hillary Clinton is not a news reporter and if she wishes to characterize Trayvon Martin's death as a murder, in the context of describing what happens to young boys at the hands of the law, she has every right to do so because her job is to accomplish change, not defend the status quo and certainly not report facts in a dispassionate manner. I consider her remark to be mild in the face of the rhetoric used by many other people who are similarly calling for policing reform.

Somerby's use of Clinton in this essay is reminiscent of Trump, who cannot tweet anything these days without yelling about Clinton. We know that Somerby doesn't like Clinton much. We'll see how Bernie deals with race issues -- his latest tone deaf remarks on the eve of MLK's death suggest he will be unable to gain the trust of African American voters, because he cannot even restrain himself from attacking our first and only black President on a day that is important to African American people, if not the rest of the nation. Hillary used her remark to express solidarity with the concerns of black people, and they largely took it that way. Somerby misses the importance of such signals and thinks she literally considered Martin's death a "murder." Never mind that she is an attorney with a great deal of public service experience. He wants to paint her as a hysterical BLM activist. News flash, Bob, she isn't running for anything, but Bernie is and he needs to learn the ropes if he hopes to get past a few caucuses and actually win some votes.

Interesting that Obama's biggest supporters in comment threads suggest that, whereas it is appropriate that he be hailed with some frequency, it is inappropriate to cite certain awkward election data, let alone, to explicitly direct a criticism at Obama for the sole reason that he is "our first and only black President." So much for how color blind his biggest boosters on the internet ever were despite what they are at pains to claim everyone should believe about them.

CMike -- tone deaf means that it is a crappy idea to make a speech criticizing Obama on a day that is very important to African Americans, MLK's death. It is like criticizing the food at a funeral reception. The criticism may be true but it is disrespectful to voice it. Because Sanders doesn't understand this, he will not bond with black voters and without them will not be electable. That's a fact, Jack.

Sanders did not make a speech criticizing Obama on a day that is very important to African Americans as suggested by 8:45 PM who is one of a thankfully dwindling number of white Democrats who think the black electorate is unable to come to rational conclusions after listening to reasoned political arguments.

In a Town Hall forum Sen. Sanders was asked what was wrong with the Democratic party. His not sufficiently enough hagiographic towards Obama answer according to both your actual and ever aspiring to be limousine liberal Resister types and to your basic, safe enough to be a corporate cable news info-tainer type was as follows:

[QUOTE]The business model, if you like, of the Democratic party for the last fifteen years or so, has been a failure. Now what happened is people don't see that because there was a charismatic individual named Barack Obama who won the presidency in 2008, 2012.

He was obviously an extraordinary candidate, a brilliant guy. But behind that reality over the last then years, Democrats have lost about 1000 seats in state legislatures all across this country and you've got significant numbers of states, like Mississippi, where the governor, the legislature, the senators are all Republicans.

Now how does this happen at a time when the Republican agenda is the agenda of the billionaire class and is at war with working people? How does it happen that a party that wants to give tax breaks to billionaires and throw millions of people off the health insurance they have, actually wins elections?

One of the things that we have got to do, which I mentioned earlier [in discussing that I, as a mayor, got the snow removed from the streets where the working class live leading to a doubling of my vote total in the next election], is make sure that the Democrats [motivate voters], you don't win elections unless you show up [to vote]![END QUOTE]

In other words, he called Obama an empty suit who messed up the party, given that he was president during the last 8 of those 15 years. It sounds fine to you because you are not black and apparently as tone deaf as Sanders, which is what it takes to be a Bernie bro.

What percentage of African Americans voted for the various Democratic presidential nominees this century 9:44 AM?

90% voted for Gore in 2000, 88% voted for Kerry in 2004, 95% voted for Obama in 2008, 93% voted for Obama in 2012, and 88% voted for Clinton in 2016.

You think because of those huge percentages with which black voters supported the Democrat over the Republican in each of those elections that going forward they will be unwilling to vote for a candidate who is critical of what has been the Democratic agenda for the last "fifteen years"?

9:44 AM you don't actually know many black voters, do you? You are making your assessment based on the pro-establishment blacks you see featured on MainStreamMedia infotainment shows. Black voters are going to be like most other Democratic voters in the coming presidential election, they'll be looking for a change candidate they can believe in, not a return to the politics of the past.

You got any young whippersnapper in mind, CMike? An 80 year old white guy who just took a shit on the first black American president and who hails from a very small mostly all-white rural state? And to top it all off, he wants the nomination from a party he refuses to join? Bwahahaha

The Bernie "revolution" political machine is hard at work now trying to rig the 2020 nomination process in order to make his coronation inevitable by making it as undemocratic as possible. I am so sorry, but I will not be able to take part in this charade. Just because you have a shriveled old dick, it doesn't mean you deserve to be president.

I was particularly startled to see Jimmy Dore's delusional plan to have the Democratic Senators filibuster any SC nominee by Trump for 4 fucking years. Yeah, I'm not surprised you are a fan, CMike. I guessed it as soon as I stumbled on to this moronic imbecile.

Yeah, Dore was out to lunch on the prospects for the Supreme Court if Trump were elected (nothing a little court packing couldn't overcome in a few years, though) and he responded ridiculously for a full week to the nonsense Fox was pushing regarding Seth Rich.

But how about the Jimmy Dore video that is relevant for this thread? Dore has the Democratic leadership/corporate propagandists dead to rights in this one (i.e. the one I linked to in my previous comment [LINK]). Congrats mookie mook, by changing the subject you posted as effective a response as any of you corporate privilege serving dead-enders could have come up with. You don't always get it wrong after all.

Yeah, Dore was out to lunch on the prospects for the Supreme Court if Trump were elected

Oopsy daisy.

(nothing a little court packing couldn't overcome in a few years, though)

Silly dilettante.

Cmike wants to defend Saint Bernie (I) from the false charge that he insulted President Obama by sending me to a Jimmy Dore YouTube video where Jimmy Dore spends a half hour insulting President Obama in the most vile terms possible. You really aren't very smart, are you?

Sanders is always at pains not to insult Obama- in fact he has a bad habit of laying on the compliments too thick when speaking of that president. Myself, I'm hostile to all the neo-liberal corporatist Democrats, and Obama is among the worst of them.

As for who's the dilettante, neo-liberal enablers like yourself think there's nothing to have been learned or to have taken notice of over the last forty years. As far as you're concerned there's never a problem critical enough that doing any more than proposing some incremental adjustment is necessary to deal with it.

Don't look now, but we have a federal (and in most places a state) judiciary that is ideologically stacked against democracy and New Deal/Great Society liberalism.

In several areas ranging from environmental concerns to labor and income to military expenditures and adventurism to the judiciary we are at places that are going to require drastic political action- that's why cultists like yourself, who are committed only to political figures in the Democratic party who have earned the Establishment's stamp of approval, are such a big part of the problem for the Democratic wing of the Democratic party.

While we're on the subject then playah, who are you big-shot Democratic insiders planning to rig the 2020 presidential nomination in favor of? If you want the challenge of doing what the rest of us say can't be done, try propping up Hillary Clinton again.

"we're deeply dishonest and very lost and we're extremely bad people."

This is what is so frustrating about Somerby. He makes some valid, if obvious, points: get the facts straight, don't reflexively blame police. Fine. No liberal I know reflexively blames police or immediately adopts some preferred narrative about these events. That said, Somerby is talking about public statements by more prominent people like Coates, Savali West, Clinton, Drum. Again, fine. Reasonable criticism of these is perfectly valid, and even welcome. There is room for discussion of the incidents in question and the statements made about them. But Somerby concludes his post, as he so often does, with the kind of statement quoted above. This shuts down the possibility of any discussion. He has made his sweeping pronouncement, maligning an entire group of people, and precluding any fair assessment of these matters. If the people making the statements are dishonest and bad, their statements are therefore not worthy of further discussion or a fair hearing. Somerby's pronouncements like this are childish rantings.

I'm a big fan of Bob, who I think takes more than his share of unfair or ridiculous criticism, but I think that you're right about this - especially in light of Bob's regular (and correct, in my view) arguments that insults and contempt don't help to persuade anyone.

Somerby is no doubt Catholic. He was taught as a child to say these things, along with the words "mea culpa" so that he could receive absolution and cleanse his sins. Catholics get off on having maxima sins, being the worst, deeply dishonest and extremely bad. All glory to God who forgives worms like Somerby (and by extension, us).

Instead of telling you that people get to discuss what they want to discuss, or inferring from your question that you think that people aren't serious in their outrage over police shooting, I'll give it a shot.

Maybe it's because police, as highly trained government agents who are supposed to be keeping people safe, are held to a higher standard than random criminals roaming the street? Maybe because it's easier to focus on trying to change behavior among a discrete group of government employees rather than trying to figure out which young Black man is going to be the next person to kill another young Black man?

There may be other possible answers. Or I could turn around the question and point out to you that about 2500 white people each year are killed by other white people in America, so why was such a big deal made about Kate Steinle's death?

"Or I could turn around the question and point out to you that about 2500 white people each year are killed by other white people in America, so why was such a big deal made about Kate Steinle's death?"

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